


The loves of Percy Weasley

by Powderpuff



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 11:12:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11988615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Powderpuff/pseuds/Powderpuff
Summary: Percy has been in love three times, and each is different from the last.





	The loves of Percy Weasley

_Oliver._

Loving Oliver is like loving flame, the warm flicker of a candle that illuminates part of the shadows. But a candle can very quickly turn into a blaze, and so it is here. Oliver’s’ love is sharp and hot and eclipsing, but Oliver loves with everything, a love so intense it exhausts more than comforts. The candle turns to a bonfire and Percy can’t handle that, that sheer intensity, so he runs, and eventually the forest fire that is Oliver meets, truly meets, the hurricane that is Marcus Flint and they become a natural disaster, love in the way the books and movies say you’re supposed to love. And it’s destructive and it’s beautiful, but it simply cannot last in that form. (they come out the other side as steel.)

But Percy doesn’t love that way.

_Penelope._

Penelope doesn’t either-theirs is a quieter, calmer love, stillness, and silence, and it heals the scorching burns. Their love is the coolness of snow and the scratching of the pen, the smell of old books in an older library, and Percy thinks “yes. This is what true love is.”

And oh Percy, all love is true, but true love doesn’t always last forever. And so it is with Penny, as Percy sets his sights on the ministry and Pen to potions, and they drift away from each other, because their lives don’t mesh the way they thought they would when they were seventeen and in love and filled with that thoughtless optimism that marks the adolescent, even sensible ones. So they part.

_Loss._

And then the dark mark appears and he fights with his father (and oh, that love hurts more, so much more because why can’t his father _see_? Why can’t he _understand_? And there are so many whys and mum just looks so broken but he can’t be like this, can’t live like this, so he breaks free from his family’s co-dependence, because they all love so fiercely and Percy just can’t keep up. And the glitter of his ambition taunts him, keeps him climbing, and he forgets to protect against the fall)

Then he slips, falls, but he doesn’t hit the ground because his family catches him, holds him safe. Loves him in the way families should love, as a net, as a blanket, as a tether. And he doesn’t love like them, but they don’t need him to. It is enough that he is there. (It was good for him to leave. It was better that he came back.)

_Audrey._

Loving Audrey is the sea breeze rustling, the setting sun over fields. The bubbling of a tea kettle at dawn. Quiet breakfasts spent hunched over crosswords, a cat purring on a windowsill. It is not the love his parents have, the one he thought so prosaic as a child, but it comes close. And in the beginning, he thinks it is enough to love her, and be loved back, in the serious, practical way Audrey loves.

At first, Percy doesn’t think there is more than this; his family, still boisterous and loud and loving; Audrey’s family (only two, now, Marcus and Oliver with their twin passions, loud arguments over statistics and brooms and quieter ones about everything else). Really, he thinks, it is enough.

Until a little dark haired and grey eyed child in laid in his arms, and Percy suddenly understands the way his parents love, the way Bill loves, and all at once his life is almost, nearly perfect. (Because _Fred, Fred, Fred_ still lingers in the back of his mind, an echo neverending, but he would not want it to)

And three years later it’s a tiny redhead, and Percy doesn’t know what he did to deserve this, but it must have been something wonderful.

 

 


End file.
